Most of Microsoft's major advances have been business/enterprise targeted. Exchange+Outlook, as a fully-integrated groupware solution, had no serious competition for a long time. The degree and ease of control that Group Policy gives domain controllers is still a major reason that companies choose Windows.

The major competitor is Lotus Notes/Domino. Exchange was first available about five years after Notes and seems to have been created in response to it. This is hardly an example of a major advance by Microsoft.

You can't buy XP after the first Service Pack for Windows 7 comes out. No new XP licenses period for anyone. Need a new staff member, welcome to a mixed environment.

Microsoft have changed that policy:

To support our customers' "unprecedented move" to migrate their PC environment to Windows 7, we have decided to extend downgrade rights to Windows XP Professional beyond the previously planned end date at Windows 7 SP1. This will help maintain consistency for downgrade rights throughout the Windows 7 lifecycle. As a result, the OEM versions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate will continue to include downgrade rights to the similar versions of Windows Vista or Windows XP Professional. Going forward, businesses can continue to purchase new PCs and utilize end user downgrade rights to Windows XP or Windows Vista until they are ready to use Windows 7. Enabling such rights throughout the Windows 7 lifecycle will make it easier for customers as they plan deployments to Windows 7.

Now, how do you identify a good PSU?

JonnyGURU gives you detailed information on the latest power supplies on the market.

We are going to run out of IPv4 addresses in March next year (422 days from today)
http://ipv4depletion.com/?page_id=4 /JB

Or September 2012: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

Also, around that time most people were still stuck on 15" monitors with 17" considered the high end with the occasional crazy bastard with a 19" monitor. 1600x1200 wasn't really a sensible resolution unless you had a 19" monitor or larger.

I had a 19" in late 1997 -- it couldn't manage 85Hz beyond 1152x864, so that's what I would normally use. I only had a Nvidia Riva 128 but most games used software rendering. I would generally run games at 800x600 or 640x480. I remember once running Quake II at 1600x1200 (16bit color) -- it looked really good but the frame rate was far too low to be playable.

That said, I wouldn't want to be looking for a functional 5 1/4" floppy drive.

I have one in my current computer, works fine in Windows XP.

DOS required to be shut down, too, if you used SmartDrive (which, IIRC, was active by default at least since MS DOS 5.0, as it improved performance quite a bit).

Many hard disks, in the days of DOS, didn't auto-park their heads. We used to run a park.com program prior hitting the power switch.